All commands (14,187)

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Share Your Commands


Check These Out

Uniquely (sort of) color text so you can see changes
Colorify colors input by converting the text to a number and then performing modulo 7 on it. This resulting number is used as the color escape code. This can be used to color the results of commands with complex outputs (like "482279054165371") so if any of the digits change, there's a good chance the color will change too. I say good chance because there's only 7 unique colors here, so assuming you were watching random numbers, there would be a 6/7 chance that the color would change when the number changed. This should really only be used to help quickly identify when things change, but should not be the only thing relied upon to positively assert that an output has not changed.

Find number of computers in domain, OU, etc .

display systemd log entries for sshd using "no-pager" (a bit like in pre-systemd: grep sshd /var/log/messages)
In pre-systemd systems, something like: "# grep sshd /var/log/messages" would display log events in /var/log/messages containing "sshd". # journalctl -u sshd --no-pager The above command displays similar results for systemd systems. (Note that this needs to be run with root permissions to access the log data.)

resolving basic authentication problem(401) with wget
I have a server with a php requiring basic authentication, like this:

Get Futurama quotations from slashdot.org servers

Extract tarball from internet without local saving
Use `tar xj` for bzip2 archives.

Download all videos in your Boxee queue
Gets all videos in your boxee queue with a URL associated with them and attempts to download each using get_flash_videos

Draw a Sierpinski triangle
OK, not the most useful but a good way to impress friends. Requires the "display" command from ImageMagick.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy


Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for: